Hacks

As I'm still a student (and a maths student, at that), I don't do all
that much "serious" programming, but I do futz around with Python
quite a bit.

The scariest hack I ever have perpetrated is undoubtedly the bytecodehacks. The
docs used to live on starship, but they've moved to sourceforge.
Development of the bytecodehacks has largely halted -- they were never
much more than a crazy idea. If someone wants to update them to
Python 2.2 or newer, I'll give my support.

I recently decided that the bytecodehacks weren't scary enough, and
wrote PPY, a package that lets you write Python
callables in PPC assembler.

Sometime around the time of Python 2.0's release, I wrote a little piece about the new setdefault
method on dictionaries, but forgot to link to it from these pages...

I have written a particularly despicable piece
of code that uses bytecodehacks and metaclasses to remove the need
for the "self" parameter that periodically gets complained about on
c.l.py.